Turning Negative Emotions into Positive Social Change

When we consider what it takes to solve the many social issues we face today, our thoughts often go to a strong sense of purpose and ethics, exceptional skills, expertise, as well as more systemic and organizational factors. In this article, however, I would like to focus on the role of emotions—especially those developed from strong formative experiences.

For this research, I considered the impact of emotions stemming from formative experiences on the resolution of social issues by reviewing case studies from non-profit organizations (NPOs).

Five NPOs (see Table 1) were selected using the following criteria: (1) they started from the ground up with the aim of solving a social issue, (2) they have grown to a certain scale (annual revenue over 300 million yen), and (3) they have been operating for an extended period of time (over 10 years).

First, let's look at Sayaka Murata of the Kamonohashi Project and Hiroki Komazaki of Florence.

When Sayaka Murata, founder of the Kamonohashi Project, was 19 years old, she read a newspaper article about the trafficking of young girls. The article featured a woman who was sold to a brothel for 100 dollars, contracted the HIV virus, developed AIDS, and died at the age of 20. The article printed her dying words: "I wish I could have gone to school and studied. Then I could have become a police officer and saved children like me."

Sayaka was heartbroken. She could not sit by and do nothing, so she saved up some money and went to visit NGOs working in the areas mentioned in the article in Thailand and Cambodia.

In 2002, Sayaka launched her own NPO called the Kamonohashi Project, together with co-representatives Kenta Aoki and Keisuke Motoki. In Cambodia, where child prostitution is a serious issue, the NPO established a computer school in Phnom Penh, enabling underprivileged children to acquire IT skills and find jobs.

However, many of the children working in Cambodia’s brothels came from impoverished agricultural areas, meaning that the organization still had a long way to go to fulfill its mission of combatting child prostitution. This led to serious considerations within the organization over whether to prioritize the model it had and adjust its mission, or to stay true to its mission and change its entire approach.

Ultimately, Sayaka and her team decided to close the computer school after three years and focus instead on supporting rural communities. The NPO still believed that the best way to combat child prostitution was to provide jobs for parents and education for their children, so it set about promoting economic development by contributing to the Community Factory project, which manufactures products from rush plants.

In addition to supporting activities that prevent children from being sent to work or sold, the organization also helped police crack down on child traffickers. As a result, the number of arrests increased nine-fold. The number of children in brothels has gone down; a sign the organization is having a real impact.

The next entrepreneur is Florence founder Hiroki Komazaki. Hiroki heard from his mother, who was a babysitter, that a mother who took time off work to care for her sick child lost her job. He was infuriated. For him, allowing time off to care for an ailing child is basic common sense, and a society that wouldn’t allow a parent to do so needs to change. In 2004, Hiroki, who was in his 20s and single at the time, launched Florence. He overcame all kinds of obstacles to set up a home visit childcare service that dispatches staff to the home of children who suddenly contract a fever, even when medical institutions are reluctant to do so.

Hiroki took some clues from the insurance industry when establishing Florence. The organization works on a benefit-in-kind insurance policy model, where users pay a monthly fee to have access to a childcare service if their child develops a fever. As someone who works in the insurance industry myself, Hiroki’s story made me wonder: Why was an NPO with limited resources able to develop such a service, but professional insurance companies were not?

Other examples of founders who launched their NPOs because of a strong formative emotion include Yumiko Watanabe of Kidsdoor, Kumi Imamura of Katariba, and Kei Kudo of Sodateage Net (see Table 1). In the next section, I’d like to delve deeper into the emotions themselves.

As shown in Figure 1 below, psychologists James Russell and Lisa Feldman Barrett use a circumplex model of emotions to map the six basic human emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness) on two axes: valence (horizontal, pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (vertical, activating to deactivating).

Unpleasant emotions like anger can have a strong stimulating effect on the mind, and can even become the catalyst for major life decisions, like starting a business. Research has also found that strong willpower and tenacity in business are reasons why entrepreneurs spurred on by formative experiences are successful. When asked directly, 59% of entrepreneurs responded that their business ideas were inspired by formative experiences.

The main aim of programs like anger management are to suppress the negative aspects that arise from emotions, but we mustn’t forget that even negative emotions can lead to positive outcomes, such as progress toward solving social issues.

Next, I will look at the structure in which emotions occur.

The essential takeaway for social issues is if we begin to accept situations that we should be angry about, we end up normalizing those situations and no longer feel anger. To link our emotions to the resolution of social issues, we need to be able to think of them as both instinctive and socially constructed, while also valuing the specific emotions that stem from our own formative experiences. The NPO founders described earlier took their own personal formative emotions seriously and were able to use them as catalysts for entrepreneurship.

I encourage you to think back on the times in your life when you felt strong emotions. Those are the emotions stemming from your formative experiences. In them, you may find your own a path to instigating social change.

Notes:
This article is based on the paper "Management Philosophy Based on Original Experiences," which was awarded the Prize for Excellence at the 7th Research Presentation Conference sponsored by The Development Engineering Society of Japan (June 29, 2024 @ Shibaura Institute of Technology Toyosu Campus).
Furthermore, the overall picture of this research theme is also introduced in SENSOR No. 67, Voluntary Society, published in the Nikkei Business Daily (10 installments in total). (Japanese only)